Nestle Manuevering for Chaffee County, Colorado Water: Is Opposition Mounting?

This comment from a StopNestleWaters.org reader is referring (I think) to the same extraction site we wrote about here on StopNestleWaters:

Nestle is currently contracting with a local rancher in a rural county in Colorado for the rights to bottle the water from a high yielding spring. This greatly affects the recharge into the Arkansas river as well as the underlying aquifer which is already being innundated with wells.

The folks at Nestle are at least being candid about job creation in the County (none) and because they are simply taking the water out they are avoiding county taxes while their trucks would tear up county roads and create a dust problem where local livestock is raised. Water is like gold in Colorado because there is a very finite supply and I could see this causing issues for many years to come.

As the reader pointed out, Nestle has got to be crossing their fingers on this one; with no promise of local economic benefit to hold over the heads of the community, a little opposition to the truck traffic, pollution, noise and related issues would probably go a long ways.

You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to realize this is the worst kind of economic development for a rural area; a precious resource is extracted and leaves the area – along with any potential profits or benefits from the sale of the resource.

Thus, while the area suffers the indignity of truck traffic (noise, safety issue, pollution, unrecompensed wear & tear on roads), there is economic benefit, except to the one person selling the water (and that’s probably being sold too cheaply).

nestle, nestle waters, chaffee county, arkansas river, rural economic development

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